chapter 18: Katherine, Mataranka and Coming Home

The 2020s arrived with me based in Katherine, delivering basic community services to aged and disabled people across Roper Gulf all the way out to the Gulf of Carpentaria. It was demanding, practical work – long drives, long days, and the constant balancing act of limited resources and high need.

By 2021 I was in Mataranka, and something important shifted. The years of community work, travel, bureaucracy and improvisation finally felt like they came together into one piece. We were short on resources, managing huge distances, dealing with COVID restrictions, and still managing to keep services going. A group of outstanding colleagues turned what could have been an exercise in survival into something that actually worked.

Mataranka became a quiet turning point. It gave me the confidence to think bigger again – not in terms of ego or status, but in terms of what might be possible if I took everything I’d learned and tried to apply it more deliberately.

Later in 2021, life took another unplanned turn and I found myself back in the Mid North, closer to where it all started. Coming home wasn’t part of some long-planned strategy. It was just what happened next.

But it opened up new space. Moving away from full-time life on communities didn’t mean leaving them behind. Instead, it created the opportunity to work on stalled community development projects – the things everyone agreed were a good idea but no one had quite had the time, money or persistence to push through.

From this base, I could maintain old connections, plan and deliver projects across many of the same communities I’d been visiting and working in since heading north. It was still the same basic pattern – travel, planning, talking, persuading – but now with more clarity about what I was doing and why.